“8 hours at my day job and another 8 hours in the garage!”

Frank Thiel and Hartmut Weigelt both have a long love affair with bikes, cars and motorsport. Frank’s dad used to be a steward on the Monte Carlo rally in the 70s and his uncle had a garage repairing and restoring pre-war cars. As he says he was “he grew up with motorsport in his milk”. He raced moto-x and enduro when he was younger and later started racing in FIA historic rallies both at home and in Sweden and Finland aboard a Saab 99 very similar to that driven by Stig Blomqvist. His friend and Dakar Classic co-driver Hartmut has been co-driving rally cars for the last 30 years and is currently racing in a privateer BMW team. He also races off-road. The Dakar is something they have always followed and for them it was almost a foregone conclusion that they would enter the Dakar Classic one day.

Frank Thiel: “I have a friend (Adi Ruhaltinger) who entered a 2-wheel drive Peugeot 504 in 2022 and that is when we started getting serious about entering ourselves. If my Saab had been on the list of eligible cars I would have entered it but unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, it isn’t. I do however also have a MAN KAT 4x4 Rally truck that is eligible and for a while we thought about entering that but in the end we found a Toyota Land Cruiser in Belgium that had done the ’22 edition and brought that instead. It needed a full rebuild and that has kept us very busy. I am CEO for a medical equipment company specialising in ophthalmics and at the moment I’m doing 8 hours at my day job and another 8 hours in the garage!”

Hartmut Weigelt: "Participating in the Dakar is a big challenge for me. I have never taken part in a regularity rally before, but I have talked to competitors from previous years, read the rules and practised with Frank. We are focusing on finding a strategy that will allow us to be competitive. The Belgian team that entered 'our' car in 2022 finished 62nd. 61st place is our first target. Clearly, we will be attacking where we can, but with the ultimate goal of being able to cross the finish line in Yanbu.”